Commonplace book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.1578 COOPERThesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke. 1642 FULLERHoly & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Earlier this morning Nige recorded his first encounter with Stanley Elkin’s brilliant and rollicking Dick Gibson Show. “Elkin is, among other things, an absolute master of the spiel,” Nige writes—“once he gets going, he has you, there’s no resisting, he sweeps you along on his torrent of words. Rather than a man writing a novel, he sounds and feels like a man talking to you, urgently, hilariously, endlessly inventively, twisting and turning the language, keeping it alive, always keeping you with him. . . .”

I studied under Elkin at Washington University in St. Louis. In fact, I wrote my masters thesis on The Dick Gibson Show—surely an academic first of some kind, as I put it elsewhere. Nige’s description of his prose, the best thing I have ever read about the experience of reading him, reminds me of the principle of style that Elkin enunciated one day in class. A student complained about Conrad’s lack of verbal concision. She held that “Less is more.” Elkin became impatient. “Less is less,” he said irritably. “More is more. Enough is enough.”

One small correction. Nige writes: “The Dick Gibson Show is loosely structured—as with Bellow, the structure is hardly the point. . . .” This is not wrong at all. Elkin’s novel is loosely structure indeed, but it has a structure. Elkin adopts the Enlightenment commonplace, which divided European history into the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Golden Age. And perhaps this might be described as a flexible structure rather than a loose one, like a card file, since Elkin is able to expand and contract it as suits his needs (“Enough is enough”), while proceeding more or less steadily toward his goal.

My full-length essay on the novel is here. The time has come for an Elkin revival.

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comments:

I think that Elkin made this same comment in print, and as I recall, he prefaced it with "Flaubert me no Flauberts." Maybe it was in a published interview. My own introduction to Elkin der spieler was "I Look Out for Ed Wolfe." And I think in the same interview (I'm trying to remember something I read a long, long time ago) he says something about it taking him a while to "find his voice." I assumed that this voice was the one in Ed Wolfe, The Bailbondsman, etc.

"Stanley Elkin, an author never accused of being a minimalist, once recalled his defense when an editor advised, 'Stanley, less is more.'

"'I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess,'' Mr. Elkin said, ''because I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.'"

D. G. Myers

A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. Here is the Commonplace Blog’s statement of principles, such as they are.